There are so many aspects to designing and delivering a conference or event, but project management is often confused with task management...... There are certainly plenty of tasks required to be delivered, and that’s no mean feat!

There are many skills and insights required to create and deliver an event, from theming to logistics, production to marketing, from contracts to registrations and much more.

But we believe there’s more required to run an event from concept to delivery. The PMI PMBOK® fifth edition refers to 10 knowledge areas, and we use all of them in our practice. Integration Management and Stakeholder Management are 2 of the business areas we believe are critical for successful delivery.

A conference or event, is not usually a single project, more often it is actually one project in a much bigger program of work. For example, an annual conference is not just a single event, it may be the major event in your calendar, but you will probably have many more events in that calendar, and each event regardless of size, is trying to achieve an organisations strategic initiative, or at least they should be….

Today I read the perfect article that articulates this common question waaaay better than I can, so I am going to quote word for word the article from one of my favourite blogs ‘Adventures in Project Management’, with minor tweaks for relevance only in our project world;

My experience has shown that successful programs have a few critical things that need to be in place. These include the right people, well defined scope and having the right structure. For this posting I will focus on structure since I believe that it is foundational for success…

Structure allows for work to be managed across teams and organizations

Structure sets the model for the way that work, teams, plans and reporting are organized

Structure allows the teams to scale and evolve as work changes

Without having a solid structure programs quickly fall apart, have quality issues, have increased cost and rework and have a very hard time meeting their goals. Think of this like a big game of Jenga in that without a strong foundation, all of the blocks will fall down…..and you will lose the game.

Yep, that pretty much says it all :)

How does your conference / event or program stack up on structure, are they sitting on a good strong foundation like the infamous tower or more of a leaning tower of Pisa....

If you’re interested in project management and the profession, subscribe to Kerrys blog one of the few I read because it’s relevant no matter the project you’re working on and it’s bite-sized and digestible :)